Regardless of what caused the shift, the poles would be relocated and climates everywhere would change dramatically. Lands of ice would melt and cause incredible floods. The new poles would freeze over, with the intense cold instantly killing life. Deserts would gain moisture; rainforests would dry up. Flora and fauna would need to adapt to the new conditions or become extinct.
If all the regions of our planet previously had different climates, and the transition had been violent, then we would expect some evidence to have been found. Here is a brief sample:
Frozen Muck
In Alaska thick frozen deposits of soil, boulder, plant and animal exist, commonly known as "muck". Prof. Frank C. Hibben of the University of New Mexico described these deposits:
"In many places, Alaskan muck is packed with animal bones and debris in trainload lots. Bones of mammoths, mastodons, several kind of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions tell a story of a faunal population. within this frozen mass lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled with lenses of ice and layers of peat and mosses. It looks as though in the midst of some cataclysmic catastrophe of ten thousand years ago the whole Alaskan world of living animals and plants was suddenly frozen in mid-motion like a grim charade.twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses . at least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted"[14]
This suggests that although volcanoes were erupting, other forces were required to dismember these animals - with mighty floods and hurricanes being the most likely.
These pits in the heart of Los Angeles are one of the richest sources of fossils discovered to date. More than 565 species all somehow got stuck in the tar (asphalt to be precise) over tens of thousands of years, fossilising all the time. Well, that's what the experts at the George C. Page Museum would have us believe, but they fail to explain the incredible density of animals that "got stuck" there. During the first University of California excavations in 1906, they found a "bed of bones" which contained over seven hundred sabre-toothed tiger skulls. These combined with wolf skulls averaged twenty per cubic yard.[15] Almost more bones than tar. They are not the bones of animals that merely got stuck and waited to die. They are "broken, mashed, contorted and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass"[16], just like in the muck of Alaska. And we mustn't overlook the fossilised birds that have been dug up, 100,000 of them, including over 138 species, 19 of which are extinct. The George C. Page Museum suggests that the 3,000 birds that are predators and scavengers may have been attempting to feed on other trapped animals, when they themselves got stuck. As sensible as this idea sounds, it fails to explain the presence of the further 97,000 birds that were non-carnivorous. Or three species of fish!Rancho La Brea tar pits
At the end of the last ice age (circa 10,000 BC) many North American species became extinct, including: mammoths, camels, Pre-Columbian horses, ground sloths, peccaries, antelopes, elephants, rhinoceroses, giant armadillos, tapirs, sabre-toothed tigers and giant bison. All of these animals are relatively large. Did they all become trapped in pits of asphalt? Was it the warmer weather that killed them? If so, could they not have shifted north?
Or were they wiped out by a terrible catastrophe?
Frozen Mammoths
"Fossil bones are astonishingly abundant in frozen ground of Alaska, but articulated[*] bones are scarce, and complete skeletons, except for rodents that died in their burrows, are almost unknown . the dispersal of the bones is as striking as their abundance and indicates general destruction of soft parts prior to burial."[17]
Meanwhile in Siberia, mammoths were being wiped out in a similar manner. Massive graveyards of their remains have been mined for ivory tusks. It has been estimated that more than half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along Siberia's Arctic coastline[18], which equates to roughly five million mammoths. Several dozen frozen mammoth carcasses have been found with the flesh still intact. They died suddenly. In their stomachs can be found undigested vegetation, including grass, bluebells, wild beans and buttercups[19] - food typically available in the summer. Scientists examining them have concluded that three of the mammoths died of asphyxiation. The cause of death of the others has not been determined.
Regardless of cause, they froze within days of dying, and when unfrozen the flesh has been fresh enough to feed to dogs. With the previous pole positioned at Hudson Bay (see below), the North Siberian coastline would have had the same latitude as Japan does today, well outside of the Arctic Circle. But when the poles shifted, the climate would have rapidly changed, from a summer savannah where mammoths munched on buttercups, to a frozen wasteland.
But wait a minute; weren't the woolly mammoths suited to living in a cold climate? They are described as woolly due to their hairy coat, but this is only hair, greaseless hair. To help protect them from the cold, all of today's Arctic mammals have glands that make their hair oily to retain warmth - the mammoths had no such gland. Although thicker, a mammoth's hair is the same as that of elephants, and they live in the tropical regions. Many animals found in equatorial jungles also have thick hair, the tiger being one such example. Anyone still unconvinced could consider this - bones of tigers, rhinoceroses and antelope were found alongside the mammoths, and these are obviously not Arctic creatures.
Bone Caves
"The great problem for geological theories to explain is that amazing phenomenon, the mingling of the remains of animals of different species and climates, discovered in exhaustless quantities in the interior parts of the earth so that the exuviae of those genera which no longer exist at all, are found confusedly mixed together in the soils of the most northerly latitudes . . . The bones of those animals which can live only in the torrid zone are buried in the frozen soil of the polar regions."[20]
All around the globe there are caves which are full of bones. Many of these contain the remains of animals that would not have normally existed alongside each other. One such cave, at Oreston, near Plymouth, England contained mammoths, rhinoceroses, bears, lions and reindeer. Kent's cave in nearby Torquay yielded, amongst another things, the bones of sabre-toothed tigers.
A cave near Settle, in West Yorkshire, contains the remains of the hippo, rhino, mammoth, bison, hyena and other animals. They are buried under twelve feet of clay deposits and the cave is 1450 feet above sea level. Charles Lyell speculated that:
"The hippopotami issued from North African rivers, such as the Nile, and swam northward in summer along the coasts of the Mediterranean, or even occasionally visited islands near the shore. Here and there they may have landed to graze or browse, tarrying awhile, and afterwards continuing their course northward.. to the Somme, Thames or Severn, making timely retreat to the south before the snow and ice set in."[21]
Yet, according to his Theory of Uniformity we should be able to observe hippos doing the same thing today! So, what could have caused hippo bones to be found deep inside English caves? They may indeed have lived in England, but hippos are not known to climb mountains by choice. They could have been hiding from the cataclysm, sharing the cave with terrified hyenas and bison. Or their bodies, dismembered by a violent cataclysm, may have washed up there, as part of a concurrent great flood. It is reasonable to say that these two ideas are more sound than hippos going on a summer holiday!
In China, near the village of Choukoutien, among the animals found in caves were a porcupine, tiger, woolly rhinoceros, camel, elephant, baboon, ostrich and a species of tortoise. They are not of the same habitat - the bones have been somehow gathered up and dumped in the caves.[22] What forces of nature could do such a thing?
In Sicilian caves were found hippopotami, hyenas, lions, Megatherium, rabbits, bears and elephants.[23] On Kotelnoi Island, in the Arctic Circle above Siberia, where "neither shrubs, nor trees, nor bushes exist", are found the bones of elephants, buffaloes, horses and rhinoceroses.[24] Similar evidence is available worldwide - proof of destruction at levels we dare not imagine to be possible.
Arctic Coral and Water Lilies
Spitsbergen (now known as Svalbard) is an island in the Arctic Ocean, just eleven degrees from the North Pole, to the north of Norway. It was uninhabited until the 1890s when a mining colony was established there. For almost six months of winter there is no sunlight, yet fossilised plants have been found there, including pines, firs, elms, swamp-cypress and water lilies.[25] [26] Regardless of climate change, these cannot grow anywhere without regular sunlight. At some time in the past, Spitsbergen must have been further away from the pole. Further evidence comes from Soviet archaeologists who have discovered prehistoric cave drawings of deer and whales, as well as axes fashioned from mammoth tusks.
Reef corals have been found deep within the Arctic Circle, on the islands of Ellesmere (Canada) and Spitsbergen. Under snow now, they must have originally grown in a tropical region.[27] Coral requires a minimum temperature of 64° Fahrenheit to grow, which means either a tropical location, or somewhere outside the tropics where warm currents bring tropical waters into higher latitudes (Japan, South Africa, and Bermuda for example).[28]
At the opposite pole, Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton found coal beds within 200 miles of the South Pole. The Byrd expedition of 1935 uncovered fossils that were later identified as tree ferns, as well as the footprint of a "mammallike reptile".[29] At both ends of the globe, places which are currently the coldest on earth, we find evidence of warmth equivalent to that of latitudes at least 30 degrees closer to the equator.
The Weight of Ice
There is a lot of ice in the polar regions. Antarctica has ice kilometres deep. The weight of this ice, estimated at nineteen quadrillion[30] tons, will surely be compacting the land below, sinking it lower than before the ice existed. If this mass of ice were to have occurred anywhere else on land, a depression would result. Take a look at a map of the world and see if you can spot an area that may have sunk - a circular area, crushed down to sea level or lower. I found two that immediately stood out - Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
Hudson Bay in NorthEast Canada is a large inland sea covering 730,380 sq km, yet has a rather shallow average depth of just 130 metres. It was the epicentre of the North American ice sheet during the last Ice Age, which extended as far south as Ohio. North West of Hudson Bay the subsoil is permanently frozen. Halfway between this region and the current North Pole is Greenland, the interior of which is covered in ice all year long. This is to be expected if it was within the previous polar circle as well as the current one - it never had a chance to melt.
Hudson Bay is roughly 30 degrees south of the North Pole, and the Gulf of Mexico a similar distance south again. These spots would fit a model of regular uni-directional shifts. If the shift had a more random nature then other previous polar locations could include a large depression in Africa called the Sudan Basin. It is littered with waterways, which have no apparent connection to each other, nor with the ocean. It contains Lake Chad, which originally covered 300,000 square kilometres, but is now less than one thirtieth of that size and is still shrinking.
The first two locations just noted are diametrically opposite regions of the Southern Ocean, areas where similar depressions in land cannot occur. Opposite Lake Chad is the South West Pacific, again devoid of major land masses.
Recent Extinction of Large Quadrupeds
"True extinction (end of a phyletic lineage without phyletic replacement) has occurred throughout the history of life on earth. Among the terrestrial vertebrates, the fossil evidence suggests two striking episodes of extinction: one at the Mesozoic-tertiary transition saw the extinction of the last dinosaurs, the other at the Pleistocene-recent transition saw the sudden dramatic disappearance of large mammals in most but not all parts of the world."[31]
"We live in a zoologically impoverished world from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared . yet it is surely a marvellous fact, and one that has been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large Mammalia, not in one place only but over half the land surface of the globe."[32]
In North America an estimated 40 million animals died at the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago). Many of the mammals became extinct, especially the larger ones. The Americas were home to a range of very large mammals, such as the Megatherium (5.5 metre ground sloth), Glyptodon (4 metre giant armadillo), mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and horses.
Gradualists, who accept that climate change could not have been the sole cause, are puzzled as to how these extinctions happened. For example, we know that post-Columbian horses thrive today in the same areas where fossils of their extinct cousins are found. The problem is made more difficult when we look at southern Africa, which contains many similar climatic zones, yet lacks the recent extinction of large mammals - large mammals that are obviously less agile than other species, less suited to sudden disasters. The Smilodon (sabre-toothed tiger) for example, while being smaller in size than the African lion, was twice as heavy[33]. Imagine if a concrete apartment building had a variety of animal species as tenants, and, as we often see on television, it was detonated. Which species could possibly survive? Giraffes? Sloths? Humans? Or smaller beings like a rat, ant or cockroach. Or in the case of a flood, which animals are unable to scale steep slopes and escape the rising waters? The poor Megatherium (which weighed 3-4 tons) would not have had a chance.
Megatherium |
Glyptodon |
INVESTIGATE - not online - Stuart, Anthony. 1986. "Who (or what) killed the giant armadillo?" New Scientist. 17: 29-31.
Grab a globe and find the southern coast of Nigeria. On the opposite side is Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean. If the North Pole's previous position was at Hudson Bay, then these two places are roughly the fulcrum points of the last pole shift. Place a finger at each position and see how you can swivel the North Pole to where Hudson Bay is today. This "line of most movement" continues down through the United States and along the west coast of South America, across Antarctica, the Indian Ocean, SouthEast Asia, China and Siberia. All points along this line would have shifted 30 degrees in latitude. The two fulcrum points are the only two spots on the globe that didn't change latitude. The closer to the fulcrum, the less the change. Closer to the "line of most movement" equals more change.
The extinctions of 10,000 years ago mostly occurred along the "line of most movement", along with major geology upheavals, such as the rising of the Andes mountain range. I suggest that during global cataclysms, at locations along the "line of most movement", there is a correlation between the size of animals and their extinction.
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